raise domestic energy prices to match the highest-priced source-the world price of oil-and to keep them pegged to that price as it continued to rise. The plan proposed to counteract the regressive effect of higher energy prices on the poor by means of a system of re bates that would return the extra cost to consumers. But no such ma- neu ver could obscure the fact that sharply rising energy prices would spread through the economy and ag- gravate inflation. The inflated prices of life's necessities, being undiminished by re bates, would still burden the poor; the uncertainty of future energy prices would hinder new investment, and in- dustry would be less capable of creat- ing new job opportunities; young peo- ple who might fill such new jobs- from twenty to fort} per cent of them now unemployed-would be disap- pointed in that hope. The plan also placed a heavy and unproductive drain on available capital. It mandated a sharp shift from those forms of en- ergy which are less demanding of cap- ital to those which are more demand- ing. The plan also required factories to shift from the burning of oil and gas to the burnIng of coal. The plan itself included an estimate that this shift alone would consume at least forty-fi ve billion dollars-a huge in- vestment that would yield no economic return to the industries and at the same time would prevent them from making more productive investments. More- over, by increasing the availability of electricity (relative to the direct use of fuel), the plan would encourage those industries which are power-intensive- and which are therefore likely to use electric power to replace people, thus increasing technological unemployment. In sum, the National Energy Plan would aggravate rather. than relieve the effects of the energy crisis: infla- tion, unemployment, lagging invest- ment, and the threat of economic de- preSSIon. It might be argued that al1 these economic difficulties are the una void- able cost of solving the energy crisis. This would be true if, as the Admin- istration has held, the answer to the crisis were conservation, and the price of energy had to be increased in order to encourage conservation. However, the Administration's hypothesis is based on a misapprehension of the funda- mental cause of the energy crisis. The crisis results from our reliance on fuels that are nonrenewable and are there- fore certain to increase in price ex- ponentIally as long as we continue to produce them. To resolve the energy crisis, the cost of producing energy must be stabilized, and the only way to stabilize it is to switch from nonrenew- able energy sources to renewable ones. The use of solar energy, for example, would eliminate the interaction that drives the cost of a nonrenewable source exponentially upward. No mat- ter how much solar energy is used on earth, the amount that emanates from the sun is not affected. When solar energy is used to grow a corn crop this year, the amount of sunlight available for fu ture crops remains constan t. Thus, the difficulty-and, consequent- ly, the cost-of acquiring energy from a renewable source, such as the sun, does not change as the energy is used (except, perhaps, to decline as devices for acquiring and using it are im- proved) . Unlike the graph relating the cost of producing a unit of nonrenew- able energy to the cumulative amount produced, with its ever-steeper upward curve, the graph for a renewable source is a horizontal or a gradually falling line. If the energy crisis is to be solved, we must shift from the rising curve to the straight line; we must undertake the transition from nonrenewable ener- gy sources to renewable ones. This the National Energy Plan failed to do, and by its failure it threatens to aggravate the energy crisis rather than resolve it. T HE political sleight of hand that replaced what President Carter has called the National Energy Plan's "cornerstone" (conservation) with a "centerpiece" (natural-gas deregula- tion) is a particularly dramatic exam- ple of the confusion that has been the most consistent feature of the energy debate. The confusion has been per- vasive, affecting not only the Admin- istration's arguments but in some de- gree its opponents' as well. The battle over deregulatIng the prIce of natu- ral gas, which determined the legisla- tive fate of the plan, reflects this con- fusion. Senator James Abourezk, of South Dakota, and Senator Howard Metzenbaum, of Ohio, opposed de- regulation on the ground that it would accelerate the rising price of energy and add to the economic burden on con- sumers-especially the poor. Although this view is well justified by the facts, it t;f . t..It { e.". b U1j 63 does not tell us how to meet the need for natural gas, and meeting this need is just as important to the nation as a stable price. Because natural gas is non- renewable, the cost of producing it, and therefore its price, rises exponen.- tially with continued production. Al- though profiteering inevitably makes matters worse, as long as consumers must rely on nonrenewable fuels such as natural gas they face endless escala- tion in energy prices. Simply opposing deregulation offers no means of break- ing this link between price and pro- duction. The same is true of energy conservation: it can reduce demand, and thus delay the price rise, but, again, the link remains, and the exponential rise in the price of energy continues. The only way to solve the problem is to shift to sources of energy that we can keep on producing without forc- ing the cost of production upward. This is the issue that lies at the heart of the energy crisis, but none of the chief par- ticipants in the congressional debate on the National Energy Plan seemed will- ing to face it. At the same time, quite apart from the debate on the plan, Congress was in fact considering the two existing sources of energy that are renewable and could-in principle, at least-solve rather than delay the en- ergy crisis: solar energy and breeder- supported nuclear power. But, curious- ly, the discussions avoided the crucial role that these energy sources might play in resolving the crisis In the topsy- turvy energy debate, the peripheral is- sues (price regulation, conservation) were propounded as though they were the heart of the matter, while the truly central issue-the shift to renewable energy sources-remained separate, largely unconnected with the debate on the plan. The discussion of the relative merits of solar and nuclear energy was also inverted. Solar energy, the oldest in- animate energy source exploited by hu- man society (in the form of windmills, wood, sailing vessels, and agriculture), was usually regarded by the members of Congress as an impractical, esoteric prod uct of advanced science. Nuclear power, which is indeed the product of ad vanced modern science, and is cer- tainly a complicated way to boil wa- ter ( the basic functIon of a nuclear-pow- er reactor is to make steam to drive an electric generator), was regarded as an unchallengeable practical reali- ty. This conventional view is reflected in the relative roles of nuclear power and solar energy in the National Ener- gy Plan: nuclear power is supposed to meet about one-fourth of the new demand for energy between 1 976 and